Based on interviews by Richard Kaufman
It was almost impossible to be on the internet in the early years of the new millennium without seeing a video clip of a particularly impressive piece of magic. On screen, a spikey-haired magician was walking the busy streets of Shibuya, when he reached up to a restaurant’s illustrated menu and plucked a real burger from it, much to the shock of surprised passersby. The trick set the internet alight, and the magician was Cyril Takayama.
Cyril has had an extraordinary career. A pioneer of street magic in the early 2000s, his first TV special was a ratings success, broadcast to millions of viewers and then reshared on nascent social media to many millions more. That success sent Cyril’s career into the stratosphere. Over the next eight years he starred in a staggering run of 16 back-to-back two-hour specials, each featuring some 30 original pieces of magic, eventually broadcast to 28 countries across southeast Asia to an audience of over 29 million viewers.
Despite enormous success, by the end of this period everything was not going well behind the scenes. “What made the work great in the beginning was that production companies were allowing me to be ambitious, to dream big, and that they supported my ideas,” Cyril said. By the end of this phase of his television career that was no longer the case, and he suffered a creative burnout. “I had lost the magic. I was not feeling creative. I wasn’t feeling motivated.” Then, on March 11, 2011, the Tōhoku earthquake, the most powerful ever recorded in Japan, caused major damage near Fukushima. “I went to help with the cleanup, and I took time to rediscover myself. One thing that I’ve never been scared of in my life is to push the reset button and to start from zero. I’ve done it so many times. When you hold on to things that don’t fill your life with joy and happiness, things that motivate you, you have to restart.” That reset took the best part of a decade, but today Cyril is back with a newfound passion for his art.
